Fantasy games of the DOS era

Fantasy covers two kinds of game that have little in common at the controls. Turn-based party RPGs ask you to assemble four to six characters, manage their spells and equipment, and fight on a grid where a single round can take a minute of thinking. Action fantasy gives you one hero, decides fights by reflexes, and treats swords and sorcery as the setting for what is otherwise an arcade game. This collection holds both.

Dungeon Master from FTL Games gave the first-person dungeon crawler its modern shape. It appeared on the Atari ST in 1987 with a party of four, real-time combat, a magic system assembled from runes rather than a spell list, and items you had to pick up and carry by hand. Westwood Associates worked from that template for Eye of the Beholder (1991), published by SSI under its licensed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules and set in the Forgotten Realms. Westwood also made the sequel, The Legend of Darkmoon, while SSI developed the third game, Assault on Myth Drannor, in-house.

Europe kept its own version of the form. The Ishar trilogy, from the French studio Silmarils, treats the party as a group of individuals: recruits are accepted by a vote of the existing members, and characters can walk out. Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny, from the German studio attic, adapts the tabletop system Das Schwarze Auge and tracks rations, illness and worn-out boots alongside the fighting. Betrayal at Krondor, made by Dynamix in Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar setting, is told in chapters like a novel and locks its chests behind word riddles.

The American line runs through Origin Systems, where Richard Garriott's Ultima series grew one continent across a decade of sequels — Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar replaced the final villain with a moral test. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, developed by Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin in 1992, put the dungeon into first-person 3D you could look up and down in. Sir-Tech's Wizardry 7 kept the older, harsher structure; New World Computing's Might and Magic went the other way, toward large and forgiving worlds, and World of Xeen joins its fourth and fifth games into a single map. SSI's own Gold Box games — Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds and the Dragonlance titles set on Krynn — run the licensed rules almost unaltered, tactical grid and all.

Not everything here is an RPG. Master of Magic, developed by Simtex and published by MicroProse, is a fantasy 4X strategy game with two parallel worlds and a research tree of spells, while Fantasy General puts fantasy armies on a hex map. Golden Axe and Rastan are arcade conversions with one fighter, no inventory and no pauses. Titles marked as playable run directly in the browser through an emulator, with no installation and no registration; a physical keyboard helps, since the party RPGs spread inventory, spells and camping across most of the keys.